More gritty than pretty

The sixth of a regular series of columns from the other side of the Atlantic discussing the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. This month as the Mayflower replica glides home triumphantly we visit the London port where the original began its voyage. 

The author’s novel Voices of the Mayflower; the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world, is out now.

‘Near to that part of the Thames on which the church abuts Rotherhithe... there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London...’

So wrote Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist as he set the scene for the terrible denouement when the evil Bill Sikes tries to escape the vengeful mob by jumping from a house overlooking the filthy waters of the Thames but slips and hangs himself. 

In typically bravura style adjectives and adverbs jostle to capture Dickens’s disgust at the ‘desolation and neglect’ of a part of London which for centuries was 'a hamlet where there is and long hath been a dock and arsenal where ships are laid up, built and repaired,’ as a 17th century account had it.

Dickens was writing in 1838 but it’s easy to imagine that 240 years earlier when the Mayflower lay at anchor preparing to make its momentous voyage in July 1620, the place would have been just as grim. A maze of narrow, muddy streets, thronged by ‘unemployed labourers of the lowest class, brazen women, ragged children, and the raft and refuse of the river.’

This was home to the skipper of the Mayflower, Christopher Jones, and his first mate, John Clarke and it was  on long-gone wharves that the Mayflower used to unload its cargoes of wine from Bordeaux. In fact, in May of 1620 it had sailed in with 50 tons of wine for a wealthy importer.

What remains of those days? Like many of the villages and towns that we have visited on the Mayflower trail, sadly, next to nothing, but that’s not to say this part of London is not steeped with maritime history.

Its name derives from the Anglo-Saxon era (410 - 1066) with Rethra meaning a sailor and Hythe, a landing place. In 893 King Alfred granted land at ‘Rethereshide’ to an archbishop. He is the English king best known for hiding in the home of a peasant woman when on the run from the Vikings, letting his concentration slip and allowing her cakes to burn. It’s one of the first stories we learnt as school children - a bit like Washington and his cherry tree. 

The docks  date back to the early16th century and earned royal approbation in 1605 when the shipwrights of England were incorporated to maintain King James’s ships and barges, which were 'slenderlie and deceitfullie' constructed. 

The shipbuilders, the caulkers and carpenters, were kept busy - but poorly paid - right up to World War Two  when the area was flattened by German bombers. By then the docks were doomed. Because of bigger vessels and containerisation, trade shifted down river to the mouth of the Thames and the last ship left in 1970.

Today, what we find is more gritty than pretty. The simplest and most interesting way to get to know the area is to follow the Thames Path, which you can pick up anywhere along the river in the city. The organisers of the anniversary, Mayflower 400 have produced a nifty app which goes from site to sight. 

Where to start? The Mayflower Pub claims to be near where the Mayflower was fitted out - though as with so many Mayflower myths and legends no one knows for sure. In 1620 it was called the Shippe Inn and rebuilt as the Spread Eagle and Crown in the 19th century. War damage led to a major refurbishment in 1957 so its cozy wood paneled bar is not as olde worlde as it seems. 

Across the road is St Mary’s Church which was built in 1716 to replace a 12th century version and it is here that skipper Jones who died in March, 1622, is buried in an unmarked grave with his first mate John Clarke nearby.

Near the church yard is a strange looking sculpture dedicated to Jones which depicts St Christopher, looking back towards the Old World, carrying a child looking forward to the New while round the corner from the pub is whimsical statue The Sunbeam Weekly and the Pilgrim’s Pocket which has a newsboy in 1930’s dress, reading a newspaper telling the story of The Mayflower and all that has happened in America since. The pilgrim is reading the paper over the boy’s shoulder, looking astonished at how the world has developed since 1620. Well he might!

Now a stroll along cobbled streets and alleyways which in Dickens day were full of ‘offensive sights and smells, stacks of warehouses, tottering house fronts, dismantled walls, chimney half crushed’ but today have been replaced by 19th century granaries and warehouses converted into apartments and smart offices.  

A mere half a mile upstream we reach the Angel. It is just as likely - maybe more so - that the pub was the watering hole favored by the Mayflower’s crew as they waited to sail to New England but the original has long gone though it does claim fittings from the 17th century.

Like the Mayflower Pub it’s a real pleasure to sit by the waterside, watching the mudlarks with their metal detectors searching for old coins on the muddy but optimistically named Bermondsey Beach and count the tourist boats and tugs chug by. It serves a decent pint too.

Across the River, on the northern bank, are the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf the financial center which rose from those abandoned docks in the 80s and 90s and to the left, with its discordant array of high-rise office blocks, the City of London.

Head west toward the unmistakable outline of Tower Bridge with its 19th century neo-Gothic towers, cross over a foot bridge to Shad Thames, once part of the largest warehouse complex in London, now converted into claustrophobic but sought-after apartments and a broad wharf lined with smart restaurants.

Keep following the app for a broader sense of pilgrim history. Borough Market, has existed for 1,000 years and is now a fashionable attraction with its stalls of fruit and veg, cheese and wine. Next, a replica of the Golden Hinde, the 16th century warship on which Francis Drake circumnavigated the world, 1577-80 and encouraged other explorers to set their sights on America. Along the riverbank the infamous Clink prison, where several Separatist leaders were imprisoned and hanged, is now a museum replete with gruesome exhibits. 

Did the men negotiating to hire the Mayflower visit the Globe Theatre built in 1599 where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed? Probably not, but they might well have heard about The Tempest, which had its first opening there, thanks to Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins. He had led a mutiny against the skipper of a ship after it had been stranded on the Bermudas some 12 years before. Some say Shakespeare was much taken with the tale and based his play on the scandal. Hopkins might well have thought himself the inspiration for the wise Prospero but given that he was later fined for running a disorderly tavern, it is fair to say he was more like the bibulous butler Stephano. 

Perhaps he reminded them of the words of Prospero’s daughter, the love struck Miranda: 

How beauteous mankind is! 

O brave new world, 

That has such people in it!

Jones no doubt was mightily glad to leave the brave but daunting world of New England when he sailed home in April 1621 and relieved to be back in action that year carrying a less demanding ‘cargo’ than the settlers - a load of salt. 

It may have been the ship’s last voyage.In 1624, the Mayflower was sold for the pittance of £128, eight shillings and precisely fourpence and was demolished or allowed to rot away. 

This month’s Wicked insult: Flutch Calf-lollies 

Flutch; The act of doing a million other things than what you are supposed to be doing - and slowly. 

Calf-lolly; a fool, an idle simpleton.

Info: Mayflower 400. For guided tours; rbhistory.org.uk. The nearest stations are at Rotherhithe and Canada Water. 

Stay: this is not really hotel country but the Double Tree Hilton in Rotherhithe Street was once the site of a 17th century warehouse.

Eat and drink: If you get that far, Borough Market is a treat.

Breaking out: The Thames Path is 184 miles long and stretches from the river’s source in Oxfordshire to the west, through the center of London to the Thames Barrier at Charlton, south east London.

Pictures: The Mayflower being demolished. The Angel.

What's in a name?

The decision to drop the word Plantation from the re-creation of the Mayflower settlers’ first home was inevitable, given the justified furore over slavery, the role of colonial powers and their mistreatment of indigenous people.

Nonetheless, the danger is that history will be re-written and not re-interpreted. 

The new name Plimouth / Patuxet is a label, Plimouth Plantation tells of a history which should not be ignored. To be logical, if the objection is to the word Plantation - with all its connotations -  then surely there must be an objection to the place itself. If statues are pulled down are we saying the Plantation should suffer the same fate?

Here’s a piece written before this news broke. Read more:

The Norman context

Another clever headline from the New European for a piece on the reopening of several galleries in Normandy, France, in celebration of Impressionist artists. This is my favourite image - by Eugène Poittevin Read more

Bathing near Étretat

A pretty place that wants for nothing

The fifth of a regular series of columns which appear in the Plymouth, Mass., paper , the Old Colony Memorial and across the region. It discusses the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. The author’s novel Voices of the Mayflower; the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world is out now.

Last month we took a detour to the ‘faire and beautiful’ of Leiden, the Dutch city where the pilgrims lived for 12 years. This month another fork in the trail, takes us to Harwich, an out of the way port on the east coast of England. 

Queen Elizabeth 1 described it as a ‘pretty place that wants for nothing’ and for centuries it was busily building ships and breeding sailors - though this year it is celebrated for one ship and one sailor. The ship; the Mayflower, which was hired in June, 1620. The sailor; skipper Christopher Jones, a Harwich man born and bred.

Some heirs to the Mayflower story are adamant that the ship was built in Harwich and announced as much on CBS News in 2013. Furthermore, they claimed the momentous voyage had actually started there and announced that they would raise £2.5 million ($3,087) to build a replica of the Mayflower and sail it proudly across the Atlantic. 

Plymouth, Devon, they insisted, was only a bit player in the drama, which it is really, but that broadside launched the battle of the ports, as the newspapers dubbed it. 

I visited the enthusiasts’ workshop some years ago when I was thinking about writing my book and admired the sturdy section of keel which had been assembled but I couldn’t help feeling their ambition was not matched by the harsh reality of time and resources. And so it proved. Instead of an ocean-going vessel an 18 foot compromise was bolted together and today is kept on a truck trailer ready to be towed to public events as an exhibit.

“Sadly, there is no proof that the ship was built here,” says local historian Richard Oxborrow. “We do know that Jones owned a ship called the Josian, which has built in Harwich, and that he swapped it for a share in the Mayflower. It’s hard to understand why because the Josian was probably bigger, better and newer.” 

What is undeniable is that Harwich has a significant sea-faring past. Three ships from the port joined in the rout of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Harwich sailor Christopher Newport skippered a ship on the first voyage to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and for centuries Harwich built ships for the Royal Navy until work dried up and it became something of a backwater.

Nonetheless the spirit of the port’s favorite son lingers. His house still stands in Kings Head Street opposite the Alma Inn, once a fine mansion, where his first wife, 17-year-old Sara Twit lived. 

Sara died in 1603 and Jones remarried a few months later to wealthy widow Josian Gray, who had inherited her late husband’s house round the corner in Church Street. It was perhaps with her money that he was able to afford the 240 ton ship which he named after her and begin to trade with continental ports such as La Rochelle and Bordeaux.

Together they had eight children yet Jones still found the time to become quite a player in Harwich Society. By his mid-thirties in 1604 he was named as a burgess in a new town charter granted by King James and  was responsible for administering the Poor Relief as well as acting as a tax assessor. His reputation was tarnished in 1605 when he was accused of keeping hunting dogs, which only ‘gentlemen’ with enough land were allowed to do.

In about 1611, he moved to Rotherhithe, a mile downstream on the Thames from the Tower of London and it was there that he was buried in 1622, one year after he returned from the voyage.

Even so, gentleman or not, Harwich hopes to make the most of his part in the saga. His home, which is privately owned, is to be opened to the public and turned into a small museum. 

And though Harwich is not quite the ‘pretty place’ which delighted Queen Elizabeth much of the old town exists, with the five principal streets running in the medieval pattern from south to north to the water’s edge and intersected by alleys. As many as 37 houses are standing though their Tudor exteriors were covered in the Georgian era and the house were Elizabeth is reputed to stay in 1561 is now a car park.

A new museum on matters Mayflower is due to open in an old Victorian school and a commemorative walk talks the visitor past the key sights. The 19th century Halfpenny Pier - so called because the entry fee was just that, half a penny - is reminder of the days when Harwich was a magnet for day trippers, and the scores of red and yellow buoys stacked by the docks and the lightships bobbing in the water attest to Harwich’s role as a center for maintaining lighthouses and safety at sea.

A gantry which had been built for the pre-war ferries still looms rustily over the quayside. In its lee a small plaque commemorates the arrival of the first of many ships carrying thousands of Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938/9. Two hundred of the children on the Kinderstransporte, as it became known, were housed in a nearby holiday camp.

One more stop; the council offices, a stern red brick Victorian building in which hangs the charter awarded the town in 1604 by James 1.

The two dense pages of Latin empowered Harwich to form ‘a corporate body consisting of a mayor and common council, comprising eight aldermen (from whom the mayor was to be chosen annually).’

The words might ring a bell. The charter shares many of the sentiments in the covenant drawn up by the men on the Mayflower such as the preservation of laws and ordinances. For corporate body, read ‘civil body politic’ and just as the mayor faced re-election annually, so too Plymouth’s first governor. 

The covenant was later seized on by some as the inspiration for the US constitution so let’s enjoy the idea of an English seafarer having a hand in its composition. Why not? The men met in his cabin and as skipper Jones was in charge of everyone on the ship. Maybe he gave them the benefit of his knowledge. 

“It’s a nice idea,” says Mr Oxborrow, unconvinced. “True or not, we’re proud of him in Harwich.”

This month’s Wicked insult: Ninny lobcock.

Ninny; a foolish and weak person, a booby, doofus, dingbat. Lobcock; a stupid blundering person. It also has a ruder definition which I will leave to the reader to work out. 

Info: Mayflower 400 and Historic Harwich.

Stay: the Pier Hotel. On the quayside, good food, view over the boats bobbing in the harbour.

Eat and drink: visitors should try the old pubs which Jones might have visited such as the Swan in King's Head Street and the Globe, King's Quay Street. The Alma Inn and Dining Rooms has a sign boasting that it ‘has been at the centre of Harwich life since the 1850s serving ale to the citizens, sailors, soldiers and farmers of the wind that passed through.’

Break out: take a train from London’s Liverpool Street, which chugs along the wide sweep of the estuary with its mudflats and wading birds, spend time exploring, then take the Stena Lines ferry to Delfshaven and from there a quick train journey to Leiden. 

Next: Following Mayflower along the coast.

Richard Holledge’s book Voices of the Mayflower is out now.

The Jones house

Not all pilgrims were saints

One of the most colourful characters in the great Mayflower adventure was Stephen Hopkins. Heres’ a piece from Hampshire Life; https://www.hampshire-life.co.uk/people/hampshire-locals-on-board-the-mayflower-1-6715120

A stroll down Stink Alley

The fourth of a regular series of columns from the other side of the Atlantic discussing the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. Today a detour across the North Sea to Holland and the ‘faire and beautiful city’ of Leiden. Home of the pilgrims from 1609 until 1620.

The first place to visit in Leiden is Stink Alley. A narrow gap between a soft furnishings shop and a silver maker it is lined with plastic refuse bins and bicycles. To call it nondescript is to give it a glamor it does not deserve. 

It was here that William Brewster and his wife Mary lived and where the pilgrim elder and his young apprentice Edward Winslow published their radical pamphlets. Today it is better known as William Brewstersteeg (alley).

To reach this unprepossessing spot stroll along cobbled streets and by canals, past noble churches and fine gabled homes of warm red brick, and as you walk you will understand that of all the places on the Mayflower trail Leiden is the loveliest. In fact, it could be argued, the most significant because it was here that the pilgrims decided to sail to freedom.

What makes it all the more beguiling is that the pilgrims would recognize the place. Only look at the map to see how unchanged it is.

Of course, everything is in lockdown but the enterprising tourist board is refusing to abandon all their plans for Mayflower 400 and have set up a virtual program of talks, walks and museum visits to be broadcast on Saturday, May 16.

I’m lucky enough to have been on the Pilgrims Route with one of the guides, historian Marike Hoogduin, who brought the place alive for me, even in a howling gale. 

Through the old cattle market we trudged, along the Galgewater where gallows stood and bodies swung, to the National Museum of Ethnology, (the Volkekunde), where its plan to explain the role of the Wampanoag in the Mayflower story will be told online. We stopped by an unimposing apartment block where a plaque announces that the artist Rembrandt was born in a house on that site. The story goes that the painter, who was born in 1606, used to play with the English children and might even have become friendly with a young Mary Chilton. Who knows? They were about the same age. It’s a nice story.

To lower the tone we paused in the old red light district and admired a pretty, pink dwelling which was once owned by a notorious prostitute nicknamed Groene Haasje (Little Green Hare). No wonder the God-fearing pilgrims were outraged by the ‘temptations’ of their new home. 

Next, the Rapenburg, the most delightful of streets with its canal lined by elegant gable houses, and the site of the university where Brewster taught. Next door the Botanical Gardens where he might have acquired a book by herbalist Rembert Dodoens which he took with him to Plymouth. The pilgrims must have noticed the golden foliage of a laburnum tree planted in 1601 and maybe heard the story of the single tulip bulb which had been brought from Turkey in the early 16th century and became the progenitor of Holland’s tulip trade. 

On the Rapenburg there is a beguiling cluster of bars such as the Grand Cafe Barrera - try the croquettes - and over the bridge, L’Esperance, a bruin cafe - brown café or pub - which opened to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. A slogan on the wall reads; cold beer gives you warm blood. 

Hard to disagree. 

The God-fearing of the city, however, would have been drawn by duty and belief to the vast stony edifice of St Peter’s Church a few steps away. Inside, a small chapel in memory of the pilgrims and outside a plaque which poignantly lists the families who were buried there, including the community’s guiding light John Robinson who lived in a house opposite. 

It was replaced in 1683, but behind the present building’s door is an unexpected delight - a courtyard of almshouses, one of 35 flower-filled squares tucked away in the city, all of them oases of calm. 

Retrace our steps along the banks of the River Vliet and, in the lee of a bridge, we find a small statue, leaning forward, one hand reaching out, as if taking the first step to an unknown destination. It was hereabouts, that the pilgrims stepped on the boats which took them to Delfshaven and the Speedwell which transported them to the rendezvous with the Mayflower in Southampton.  

The moment is vividly recorded by Adam Willaerts, a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, in Departure of the Pilgrim Fathers From Delfshaven. which was painted in the same year. It is striking how many of the passengers carry arms, even some women are holding pikes, and this apparently militant display has been used by some to promote the argument that the pilgrims were invaders, eager to conquer and kill. 

I rather think it has more to do with defending themselves against the ‘wild lions’ they feared they would encounter. 

The painting can be found in the Lakenhal Museum, built in 1640 as a hall for cloth merchants, along with classic depictions of the city in the 17th century. Curator Jori Zijlmans had plans to stage an exhibition which traced the story of the pilgrims from 1604 with paintings, documents and artefacts and is keen to frame their lives in the context of refugees and freedom today - something she will discuss online. 

The camera will also go behind the door of the American Pilgrims House, a tiny museum given over to recreating life in the early 17th century. The creation of Jeremy Bangs, the pre-eminent historian on the Mayflower story, his work Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners is the definitive account of life in Leiden in those years, and his museum one of the oldest houses in Holland. It is a dusty treasure trove of ancient books, chests, cooking implements and tools, all cluttered around a fireplace and a tiny bed. Apparently people slept sitting up. Who knew!

However, Leiden is not lost in the past. It’s lively where you want it to be - the cafes and restaurants are usually abuzz - but the streets are quiet. Cyclists, not cars, rule here.

Quirky too. More than 100 poems by such as Rimbaud, Pablo Neruda and Shakespeare have been inscribed on city walls but this, Travel Safely, by an Iranian poet Shafi'i Kadkani tells of a refugee fleeing his homeland and speaks to centuries of fugitives - and pilgrims. 

It ends:

‘Travel safely then! But my friend, I beg you,

When you have passed safely from this brutal wasteland,

And reached blossoms, and the rain,

Greet them from me.’

For the pilgrims, the days of blossoms were a long way off. 

This month’s Wicked insult: Jobbernol goosecap. Jobbernol is a misshapen head, a blockhead. Goosecap is a silly person especially a flighty young girl.

Info: virtual guide on Facebook and You Tube at 4pm European time, 10 am Eastern Time. 

Contacts: Leiden Tourist Office (VVV Leiden), Stationsweg 26, 2312 AV Leiden, +31 71 516 6000.  info@mayflower400tours.com. 

To stay: Hotel Steenhof Suites, a converted house with handsome stepped gables, rooms with beams and original fireplaces. Spectacular breakfast of eggs cocotte, nutty yoghurt, cold meat, cheese and croissants.

To eat: The Waag, a cavernous brasserie, once the old weigh station on the site where the pilgrims landed after leaving Amsterdam. More sophisticated, the Sabor on St Peter’s Square. Best in summer when you can sit outdoors.

Along the Galgewater - then and now

Leiden in the pilgrims’ day

Betrayed in Boston

The idea of this column is to tell the curious in New England a little about Old England’s Mayflower country - the places where some pilgrims came from and where their radical beliefs were formed. There may well have been some dedicated folk who planned a pilgrimage to these historic towns and villages on this 400th anniversary year of the voyage but, sadly, to quote Plymouth’s governor William Bradford, that is ‘an adventure almost desperate.’ 

Interest, though, is undimmed, if the non-stop discussions on the many descendants’ societies I follow are anything to go by, so perhaps we can pick up with the runaways who last month were in Gainsborough. Their destination was Boston, Lincolnshire, a port on the east coast 50 miles away where they planned to sail to freedom in Amsterdam, Holland.

If you have the boots, the knees and the dedication you can walk those miles, just as our band of refugees are reckoned to have done in 1607 or 1608, along the twists and turns of the River Trent to Torksey Lock about 10 miles away, the Fossdyke canal, built by the Romans in AD 120 and on to Lincoln. It’s long - but it is flat.

It’s more than likely the fugitives slunk past the city for fear of arrest but Lincoln is most definitely not a place to bypass. Its old town is a delight of cobbled streets, antique shops, cafes and restaurants, a battle  - scarred castle, and a cathedral which is a fabulous confection of Gothic-flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and pointed arches. Get a flavour of it here; https://tourmkr.com/g/G1BIv2jYQi/377331p,9414m,95.34h,76.46t.

The experts at the Wren Library had planned to display an original copy of “Good News from New England,” an account of life in the settlement, written in 1624 by pilgrim stalwart Edward Winslow. Frankly it is a work of propaganda designed to impress potential investors in England by boasting that ‘the wondrous kindness and providence of God’ had made the place prosper but to see its frayed pages brings a flutter to the heart. You can read them here; https://archive.org/details/goodnewesfromnew00wins/page/n8/mode/2up

Also from the library archive, and every bit as fascinating, is the “Sea Mans Grammar and Dictionary” by the explorer John Smith, a Lincolnshire lad who mapped out much of the east coast of New England in the early 17th century. He lists everything required for a voyage from the names of the anchors, cables and sails, the tactics of ‘giving chase and boarding a man of war,’ to the correct amount to spend on butter - eight shillings, which if my math is correct is $216 today. You can download his advice on http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/bookshelf/details.html?bookid=27

Another prized possession; the first Bible printed in America by John Eliot in 1663. The Native Americans had no tradition of writing down words so Eliot translated the entire work relying on speech  alone. A staggering achievement.  

You could keep walking to Boston along the banks of the River Witham through empty fenland with only fishermen, butterflies and birds for company but it is 30 miles away - bit of a tall order - so for most latter day pilgrims it is a one hour’s drive.

Guiding your way for many miles away is the looming tower of St Botolph’s church, inelegantly  known as The Stump.

Work on the church began in the 14th century and the 272-feet high tower was completed between 1510 and 1520 as a testimony to the immense wealth of the region’s wool trade which in the 13th century was selling three million fleeces a year to European cities in exchange for timber and luxury goods.

In the 1700s Boston supplied one-third of London’s grain from granaries along the banks of the River Haven but today there is an air of abandonment along the wharves and many of the warehouses have been converted to apartments. It still has a fine square lined with Georgian houses but their days of bourgeois opulence have long faded and instead many have been taken over by charity shops and the equivalent of dollar stores. 

It was on the river four miles out of town that the refugees had arranged to be picked up by a ship but their hopes were cruelly dashed. A memorial marks the place where the fugitives were betrayed by the ship’s captain, arrested, and taken back to the town where the constables made a ‘spectacle of them to the multitude that came flocking.’

Their home for the next month was the prison cells of the ancient Guildhall.

The rich merchants of Boston’s Guild of St Mary had spared no expense in its building in the 1390s by importing wood from the Baltic for timbers and even employing Flemish brick makers but they did not waste their money on the cramped cells or the narrow steps which still lead to the daunting, panelled courtroom.

Again, for the historically minded, a fascinating document is on display at the Guildhall Museum which sheds light on the escape attempt.

I chatted to the Museum’s knowledgable heritage manager Luke Skerritt who recently discovered documents in the county’s archive which revealed that far from a spontaneous bid to escape, the refugees actually settled in Boston for at least three months beforehand.

It appears that Boston had many sympathizers to their anti-establishment Separatist cause who were willing to hide them and help the escape. This nonconformity chimes in with the region’s history of dissent, not least during the angst-ridden Brexit debate. Boston was invariably held up as an example of ‘left behind’ Britain, resentful of East Europeans taking local jobs and disturbed by the number of Polish shops in the market square. Unsurprisingly they voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union - for them it meant freedom from the stifling bureaucracy of the EU establishment. 

The refugees had no vote in the matter. If they wanted freedom they had to use their wits, break the rules, skulk in the hedgerows to hide from authority. A memorial made of rock quarried from Plymouth, MA, recalls one attempt to flee from the banks of the River Humber near Immingham, Lincolnshire, but once more they were betrayed, once again imprisoned. Still they persevered and by the summer of 1608 Bradford wrote: “In the end notwithstanding the storms of opposition they all got over .... And met together again with no small rejoicing.”

Next month: The refugees in Leiden, ‘a fair and beautiful city.’

For news and updates check; info@mayflower400tours.com. 1-800-303-5534

This month’s 17th century wicked word: drawlatch hoyden. Drawlatch an obsolete word meaning a housebreaker or thief and hoyden, a high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl.

Richard Holledge’s book, Voices of the Mayflower is out now.

Chepe and cheerful →

This appeared in the New European on March 26, 2020, though not online. The exhibition was cancelled, of course, but the catalogue can be bought online. It’s a real treat which proves that little has changed by way of concerns - and vanity - over the years.

IN 1477 William Caxton, the man who introduced the printing press to England, fixed a slip of paper to a church porch to advertise the Sarum Pie, or the Ordinale ad usum Sarum, a handbook for priests. 

The advertisement reassured clients that the text of the handbook was “truly correct” and that the buyer ‘shal have them good chepe’ (cheaply) and he appealed: ‘Supplico stet cedula’ - please do not remove this notice.

In a delightful exhibition, The Art of Advertising at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, scores of images dating from the dense print of Caxton’s notice to the flashy glamour of a 1930s jazz-age flapper in a shiny Morris car offer a glimpse into the spirit of the times - the inconsequential matters of passionate concern that have obsessed us over the centuries such as health and wealth, what to wear, how to look and how to behave. 

Most of the exhibits are from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, accumulated by the late Printer to the University at Oxford, who collected about 1.5 million items - mostly single-sheets, billboards, postcards, flyers and posters. Johnson described his hoard as ‘everything which would ordinarily go into the wastepaper basket after use, everything printed which is not actually a book.’ 

What he rescued from the bin may seem trivial today, but as lead curator, Julie Anne Lambert says: “Their messages are now redundant, their immediacy, sometimes even their meaning, lost. And yet, although they were not conceived for that purpose, advertisements bear witness to their age, often encapsulating its zeitgeist.”

The result is quaint, curious, and with the perspective of 21st century sensibilities, absurd and often, downright dishonest: shaving razors for use while hunting? Cadbury’s cocoa more nutritious than meat, eggs and bread combined? And what about the prospect of immortality offered by Blackham’s Vegetable Tonic which promised to ‘utterly destroy’ The Death Microbe? Take your pick.

The exhibition follows the development of printing from the simple letter press of Caxton’s day, to the wood cuts from the 15th and 16th centuries and on to the 19th century with the invention of  chromolithography, a method for making colour prints using chemicals instead of the raised image of a relief. 

In a kind of symbiosis, as the technologies improved they reflected a society which, for some, became increasingly sophisticated and wealthy and to whom the advertisers targeted their wares accordingly.

Like Caxton’s little poster the earliest adverts were densely displayed and came straight to the point. The Elixir Stomachicum; or, The Great Cordial Elixir published in 1698, claimed to be ‘of a Delicate Flavour, and pleasant (though bitter) Taste to be drank at any time , but especially in a Morning in any Liquor, as Ale, Tea, Canary (a sweet fortified wine) etc.’ It promised to ‘ease scurvey, purifie the Blood, Expell Wind, for all indispositions of the Stomach’ and boasted that it ‘excells any One medicine ever made public.’

By the early 19th century thanks to wood engraving, a refinement of the wood cut, these wordy ads were increasingly replaced by dramatic posters such as Lotteries End for Ever in which the message from a strident bell ringer is picked out in bold red and black lettering which could easily be read by passers by in the street.  

Simple, direct, but with the introduction of chromolithography, the range and versatility of the displays moved up several notches - and none more than with the promotion of Pears soap in 1887. Thomas Barratt, managing director of the soap company bought the copyright to A Child’s World by the Royal Academician John Everett Millais which depicted a boy gazing at bubbles as they floated off into the unknown. Barratt cheekily added a bar of Pears soap, the brand name and a new title, Bubbles. 

Millais was horrified but without a copyright had no choice but to accept the inevitable as his re-worked image became one of the most enduring adverts until the 1920s, appearing on billboards and in books more than three million times.

A soap rival, Sunlight, played a similar game with Charles Burton Barber, a regular exhibitor at the RA transforming A Girl with Dogs into The Family Wash and a painting by Academician William Powell Frith, A New Frock, was transformed by Sunlight into a child holding up her clothing with the slogan So Clean.

Being clean and busying oneself with the housework was a constant theme and the adverts of the 19th century are reminders that this was a world where the affluent had servants who, of course, were happy with their lot and eager to use new products such as Lutticke’s original cold water soap. The ad shows  contrasting images, one with two servants coughing in the steam and weighed down by the misery of washing day, and in the other, dancing for joy once they used the soap which promised ‘no heat, no steam, no chapped hands.’

In For spring cleaning use Calverts, the lady of the house simpers admiringly as her servant cheerily washes down the floor with a damp rag, a bucket and the all-new No.5 carbolic soap.

By the end of the century the world of women is changing. Not only do the advertisers target them as the person in charge of the household budget but also, then as now, a pretty female face makes a more appealing pitch to the household member who actually provides the money. The husband. 

Some themes remain familiar to readers of today’s women’s magazines; the Royal Worcester Adjusto corsets for the ‘generous or fuller figure’ promises ‘luxurious freedom and comfort’ and Figuroids tablets are marketed as ‘the only method by which it is possible to remove fat from the body.’

But the ads also recognise that women were also gaining some independence.  

Vote for Nixey’s Boot Polish combines a reference to the suffragette movement with a, frankly,  deranged-looking woman stepping out confidently in her shiny boots clutching a poster while the right of women to smoke is encouraged by a tobacco maker with the words; ‘It is now fashionable for ladies to smoke dainty little cigarettes and why not?’  

In 1908 a confident young woman, independent and free spirited, strides out as Miss Remington who enthuses over the portable typewriter she is carrying - ‘delightful to operate and so compact.’ Though it does rather confirm her role as secretary - the boardroom is some way off for the Miss Remingtons of this world.  

By now - the end of the Victorian era and the start of the 20th - the advertisers tug at the purse strings by using glamour and celebrity. Mennen’s borated talcum powder claims the endorsement of such stellar names as actresses Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry as well as opera singers Adelina Patti and Dame Nellie Melba with the claim,‘The above celebrities all recommend “Mennen.”’  

Ellen Terry was happy to pose for Koko for the Hair, vouchsafing she had used the product for many years and ‘can assure my friends that it stops my hair from falling out... and is the most pleasant dressing imaginable.’

With no control over content - the Advertising Authority launched only in 1962 - the royal family, the ultimate in celebrity, was exploited with scant regard to propriety. 

Matchless metal polish managed to combine the death of the Queen while celebrating her successor, the newly-crowned Edward VII. ‘A “Matchless” Reign and a “Matchless” Metal Polish’ it declared and exhorted consumers to ‘BE LOYAL! DON’T PURCHASE FOREIGN POLISHES’. 

Victoria looks on severely as the public is being encouraged to ‘Ask for Golfer Oats.’ The makers capitalised on her diamond jubilee year (1897) by proclaiming that their porridge was ‘the latest development of jubilee year ... unequalled for Infants and Invalids’ and claiming that their porridge and the Queen together were ‘the two safeguards of the constitution’. 

By the 1920s the advertisements had long substituted laborious accounts of a product’s virtues by concentrating on the brand’s image - often with examples of stylish commercial art.

Aubrey Beardsley drew posters for the literary periodical, The Yellow Book, and Dudley Hardy did as much as anyone to influence the new style with his poster of an effervescent girl dressed in yellow advertising a weekly magazine, To-day.

The Beggarstaffs - a pseudonym for designers William Nicholson and James Pryde - brought strong outlines to Rowntree’s Elect Coffee, and Maurice Greiffenhagen used only three blocks of colour - red, black and off-white - to make an impact with an elegant lady reading the Illustrated Pall Mall Budget. 

Perhaps the most distinctive of the commercial artists was John Hassall who added humour to simple depictions of everyday life. A bald man scratching his head, searching for his Andrews Liver Salt which remains unseen in his back pocket, is a classic. ‘I Must have left it behind’ reads the slogan.

For most of the years covered by the exhibition the impetus for the advertisement came from the printer or the owner of the product or store but by the 1930s, the advertising agency was taking over, offering a complete professional service. One company boasted that it required only ‘details of the story you wish to tell, the client you wish to reach, and the openings you wish to develop’ for it to launch a campaign. 

In consequence the hidden persuaders of the ad world became a multi-million pound industry. Today the United Kingdom ranks fourth among the world’s advertising markets with expenditure estimated at £21.19 billion in 2016 and, as one might expect earnings in the industry are also high with ad giants Saatchi and Saatchi, for example, topping the pay league with income per head at £172,487, according to trade magazine Campaign in November 2018. 

In fact, vast amounts of money have washed around the industry for years. In 1863 one Thomas Holloway, seller of pills and ointment, was at pains to explain the value of advertising because he was not prepared to settle for a ‘limited reputation’ but instead ‘to be content with nothing less than girdling the globe  with Depôts of my remedies.’ 

To achieve that in that one year alone, he invested £40,000. About £5 million in today’s money. 

Even Saatchi and Saatchi would be impressed by that.

Poor social spacing but clean hands. 1890s

If only…

Then as now; policeman on the case

From 1884, bringing joy to washing day

Following the ‘brainsick conspirators’ to Gainsborough

This is hidden behind the Trans_Atlantic paywall of the Plymouth, Massachusetts, newspaper owned by the Wicked Local chain. It’s one of a series relating to the Mayflower anniversary and to the book Voices of the Mayflower.

There’s no denying, the pews in St Wilfrid’s need a spruce up. So does the peeling paint on the walls of this ancient building in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. Hardly surprising, it dates back to the 15th century.

Of course, for many Mayflower descendants and aficionados, Scrooby is where it all began; where the likes of William Bradford and William Brewster developed their Separatist beliefs and from where they resolved to flee England in the fall of 1607.

This month, we follow the footsteps of these ‘brainsick conspirators’, as the Archbishop of York damned them, as they set off on their way to escape from the port of Boston, 60 miles away.

But, first, back to those peeling walls. Last month, the vicar’s husband, a colorful figure sporting a battered bushwhacker hat and paint-spattered clothes was buffing up the pews with a brush and a can of varnish. Even the benches preserved since the 16th Century on which William Brewster himself might have prayed are in need of TLC.

No one’s fault; many churches in the UK - maybe most - are under-used and under-funded, but it is 2020, it is the 400th anniversary of the great voyage and St Wilfrid’s should be looking its best.

So, just a thought, if there are any descendants of Brewster and Bradford, indeed anyone with Mayflower connections they might want to rally round to cheer up this essential part of the story and contact  the vicar by email - revjackiemckenna@yahoo.co.uk.

(An irrelevant aside; the previous vicar of Scrooby was also a woman and she won fame as one of the critics on the UK version of Gogglebox. She left the parish and starred in Celebrity Master Chef).

Before we leave Scrooby it is worth making a detour of a few miles to Bassetlaw Museum in the attractive market town of Retford, in north Nottinghamshire which has recently opened a small gallery devoted to the Mayflower. It is very informative, and nicely presented with co-curator and enthusiast, Isabelle Richards, in costume ready to explain all.

Back on the fugitives’ trail. From Scrooby the pilgrims set off by foot and boat along the River Ryton, which runs by Brewster’s manor, into the well-named River Idle and to the Trent.

They might have tramped across meadows filled with exotically named plants such as bird’s-foot-trefoil, devil’s-bit scabious and sneezewort wildflowers but most of these meadows are now long gone. Today the way is by car and the horizon is blurred by smoke belching power stations which like much of the old steel and mining industry will be closed to meet the demands of climate change restrictions. 

The runaways made their way to Gainsborough where more fellow travelers were waiting to join them on the perilous adventure 

Despite being 55 miles inland it was one of the busiest ports in the country with wharves bustling with shipping and warehouses full of wool waiting to be exported to Europe.

The town has a rich history. During the occupation of Britain by the Romans a canal was built in about AD 210 which flows, straight as die from the Trent at nearby Torksey to Lincoln - a route the fugitives must surely have followed.

Gainsborough was briefly the capital of England after it had been conquered in 1013 by a Danish king, one Sweyn Forkbeard. A ferocious figure he had spent at least 20 years pillaging and plundering England but he ruled only for five weeks from Christmas Day in 1013 until his death on February 3, 1014> He was succeeded by another figure for England’s past mythology, King Canute (Cnut the Great) who, according to legend, tried to command the waves from coming in with the tide. Some say his feet were soaked by a tidal bore which races upstream in spring and others believe that Gainsborough was the setting for George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and it was this flood which swept away the hero Tom.

History came clattering up to Gainsborough’s gates again on the July, 28, 1643, during the English Civil War when the Royalists who supported Charles 1 were routed by the Parliamentarians, only for the Royalists to strike and drive off the smaller Parliamentary force.

For Bradford and his apprehensive band Gainsborough was something of a haven, a hotbed of dissenters who shared similar radical views as the Scrooby contingent. One of their leaders was Thomas Helwys who would meet with the sixty or seventy Separatists in secret in Gainsborough Old Hall which was owned by one Sir William Hickman, a sympathizer to the cause.

It was Helwys who helped organize the eventual escape to Amsterdam - as Separatist leader John Robinson wrote, ’If any brought oars, he brought sails’ - but his extreme views landed him in a London Prison and he died in 1616 aged 40. 

It is fair to say, there is tremendous row between local historians over the involvement of Hickman and whether he did indeed support the Separatists but there can be no disagreement over the glories of the Old Hall, where perhaps the escapers huddled, waiting to continue their journey. 

Hickman paid £5,200 in 1596 for the building which is more than 500 years old and one of the finest medieval manor houses in England. (In today’s prices about $ 907,000).

It is a fine sight with its worn brick and black and white timber frame and the main hall with its elaborate vaulted timber roof is redolent of councils of war and grand banquets. Historians suggest that Scrooby Manor, now a shadow of its former self, might well have looked like this - which would explain why Queen Elizabeth 1 coveted it as a royal residence and offered to pay £40 a year for 70 years for the privilege. She was dissuaded by the Archbishop of York who ‘pleaded and prayed with tears, protested and begged,’ for her not to sign the document.

The kitchen is suitably begrimed, as one might expect from one of the most complete medieval kitchens in England with its two open fireplaces, each large enough to roast an ox.

A little different to the fare in the two pubs nearby - the Sweyn Forkbeard and the Canute - though the Canute does compete with a four tier burger. With fries.  

• Best bet for travellers following the pilgrims’ progress check info@mayflower400tours.com. 1-800-303-5534 or contact local guide and historian Adrian Gray; mail@www.pilgrimsandprophets.co.uk

• This month’s 17th century wicked word.

Noddy meacock. Noddy is a crude reference to anyone with a mental problem. Meacock is a cowardly or effeminate man.

Richard Holledge’s book, Voices of the Mayflower is out on February 28. 

Next month; “A large number of them had to take passage from Boston in Lincolnshire ...” William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation.

Old Hall, Gainsborough

Having a Deco at the seaside

British seaside - rainy, fish and soggy chips, deckchairs. That’s the caricature but for a brief flowering in the 1920s and 30s the resorts were glamorous and stylish. Read more in the New European - all seven pages!

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/british-art-deco-paintings-that-lined-britain-s-seafront-1-6535238

From Austerfield to Boston via Scrooby, Gainsborough and Lincoln; the Mayflower trail

This was hidden behind the Wall Street Journal paywall. Nothing against that; just too mean to cough up. Here’s a piece following the Separatist fugitives on their first attempt to flee persecution in England and find freedom of thought in Holland.

I traced their footsteps when researching my book on the Mayflower - Voices of the Mayflower, the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world. Out now!

March 13, 2020 

KING HENRY VIII of England had no doubts. In 1536, faced with uppity “traitors and rebels,” he dubbed the county of Lincolnshire as one of the “most brute and beestelie [beastly] of the hole realme.” It was a tad unfair but, even today, the county is not an immediate choice as a vacation destination. It’s a part of northern England that drivers speed through, unimpressed by the big skies and widescreen sunsets and unaware of the historic secrets to be discovered in the villages, great halls and solid stone churches.

This year presents a compelling reason to visit: 2020 is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage to New England, and it was in that ‘beastly’ county and the neighboring districts of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire where the seeds of religious dissidence were sown, leading eventually to that momentous adventure.

Where to start? The trail begins in the village of Austerfield, some 160 miles due north of London. It ends some 60 miles away near Boston, Lincolnshire, where, in 1607, the dissidents made their first abortive attempt to flee persecution and settle in the tolerant Netherlands. Eventually they succeeded and moved first to Amsterdam and then to the city of Leiden until, disillusioned, they decided to settle in America. After their own ship, the Speedwell, sprang a leak, they were forced to sail on the Mayflower from Plymouth, England.

It was in Austerfield that William Bradford, who was to become the governor of Plymouth, New England, was born in 1590 and where he lived in his grandfather’s house, which today is a modest private home. There’s nothing picture-postcard, thatch-and-timber about the village, but the 11th-century church of St Helena’s is a simple limestone building with a little bell tower and a font in which the boy might have been baptized in the spring of 1590. The church is an oasis of calm with its graveyard of lopsided gravestones, looming conifers and a view across empty countryside that has changed little since young Bradford’s day.

The boy’s beliefs in the radical movement of Separatism were fired by William Brewster, who, as postmaster, lived in Scrooby Manor a little more than 2 miles away. The manor had become a hotbed of dissent, and Bradford would trudge along the cart tracks to join his mentor. The manor was demolished around 1636, though one wing was renovated as a private farmhouse in 1750. The church of St. Wilfrid’s is still standing, where, it’s said, Brewster himself may have prayed on two well-worn pews, preserved from the 16th century. The Scrooby congregation often walked the 7 miles to All Saints’ Church, Babworth, to seek inspiration from one of the movement’s most charismatic speakers, Richard Clyfton.

It’s an atmospheric, shadowy spot with a churchyard covered in snowdrops in late winter and daffodils in spring. Inside—forgive the irreverence—you will find the force is with you; a well-worn stone figure in the knave looks uncannily like Yoda, the seer of Star Wars.

These churches are humble places of worship—some of the pews are in need of varnish, the paint is often peeling on walls, the floors uneven, with memorial stones smoothed down by generations of footsteps. There’s the slight damp smell that pervades ancient buildings. Let the imagination roam; conjure up the voices raised in pietistic passion.

It is possible to follow in Bradford’s footsteps along the 9 miles or so from Austerfield to Babworth, though the cart tracks and byways have been mostly replaced by tarmac. Walk or drive, this might be the moment to pause. Retford, one mile away, has recently opened a Pilgrims Gallery in the Bassetlaw Museum, dedicated to the Mayflower story.

The journey is far from over. It is likely they walked—or sailed—to Gainsborough, where they probably gathered in the Old Hall. Tucked away in back streets, it is one of the best preserved timber-frame manor houses in the U.K., with a spectacular vaulted hall and a vast kitchen and fireplaces big enough to roast an ox.

This is the moment for those with stout boots and hearts to embrace the inner Pilgrim and get hiking. You can follow the River Trent as it snakes its way to Torksey Lock about 5 miles away, where it meets the Fossdyke canal, built by the Romans in AD 120; on to Lincoln, another 10 miles. Boston is 30 miles away along the banks of the River Witham; you can amble through empty marshland with fishermen, butterflies and birds for company. The trail is long, but it is flat.

The fugitives would have slunk past Lincoln for fear of arrest, but this is most definitely not a place to bypass. Lincoln’s old town is a delight of cobbled streets, antique shops and cafes, dominated by the cathedral, a confection of Gothic flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and pointed arches. From Aug. 1 to Sept. 30, its Wren Library will display writings from the Mayflower adventure such as an original copy of “Good News from New England,” an account of life in the settlement, written in 1624 by Pilgrim stalwart Edward Winslow. Seeing its frayed pages brings a flutter to the soul.

Let’s be realistic: Few will walk the walk. Most will rent a car to drive one hour to Boston or join one of the tours organized by Mayflower 400, which is supervising the anniversary events and outings (mayflower400uk.org). In Boston stands the looming 16th-century tower of St. Botolph’s church, better known, rather inelegantly, as the Stump. Stretching 272 feet high, it was a landmark for seafarers and travelers long before the Pilgrims arrived. And on the bleak banks of the River Haven a memorial marks the spot where the fugitives were seized as they boarded the ship they hired to take them to freedom. They were flung into the cramped cells of the town’s 14th-century Guildhall and forced to face the magistrates in the courtroom—all still well preserved.

Nothing could deter them, however. By the summer of 1608 most of them had escaped England, and Bradford declared: “In the end... they all got over... and met together again with no small rejoicing.”

THE LOWDOWN

Getting There and Around

LNER trains run from London Kings Cross to Retford (about 80 minutes one-way) and Lincoln (two hours). Fares vary enormously, so book in advance on Trainline (thetrainline.com). To make the most of this latter-day pilgrimage check out mayflower400tours.com for guided tours, hotels and details of key sights, or contact local guides such as Adrian Gray (pilgrimsandprophets.co.uk), who will explain the history, knows where the best pubs are and, above all, will ensure the churches are open. The local tourist boards, notably Visit Nottinghamshire (visit-nottinghamshire.co.uk) and Visit Lincolnshire (visitlincolnshire.com) can also offer useful guidance.

Staying There

The White Hart hotel, in the heart of Lincoln’s old town, offers decent rooms, a bar and a grill that serves a solid full English breakfast, complete with black pudding and beans. Some bedroom windows look out over the cathedral, while the 11th-century castle is just across the square (from about $162 a night, whitehart-lincoln.co.uk). Boston also has a White Hart hotel (no relation), set on the market square, round the corner from the Guildhall and the Stump. For a not-so-light lunchtime snack at the hotel restaurant, try the locally made Boston sausage with toasted brioche and red onion marmalade (from $106 a night, whitehartboston.com). In Retford— a handy base if you’re planning to visit the villages of Austerfield, Scrooby and Babworth—book Ye Olde Bell Inn, which comes with a spa (from $115 a night, yeoldebell-hotel.co.uk).

A view from over here... ramblings on Mayflower 400

In the first of a regular series of columns from the other side of the Atlantic discussing the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. The author’s novel Voices of the Mayflower; the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world is out in February.

You might be disappointed. The village of Austerfield is far from ye olde English picture postcard image of timber and thatch one would like it to be.

Without wishing to offend, it is a hum drum now as it was when a young William Bradford sat in the pews of the village church of St Helena’s, clutching his Book of Common Prayer and murmuring his prayers.

On one side of the church a bungalow, on the other ruined farm buildings. Opposite, a maker of gravestones (You know what real estate agents say about location) and almost hidden by a tall hedge, a factory making carbon-based products. The traffic is heavy. 

No, this little settlement in the north of England does not send the pulses racing despite the welcome in the Mayflower Inn with its four bedrooms and a menu offering fish and chips and a chef’s special. 

But the church is a joy, a little oasis of calm with its graveyard of conifers and lopsided gravestones. It dates back to 1080 when it was built by a descendant of one of William the Conqueror’s invading army and boasts a little bell tower and a font in which the boy could have been baptized in the spring of 1590. It was reunited with its the lead liner in the 19th century after years of use watering animals. Bizarrely, graphic carvings of naked women known as sheela na gigs which were used to used to ward off death, evil and demons hover over the portals. 

Stand in the churchyard and imagine the lad, yet to be gripped by the religious fervour which was drive him eventually to become the governor of the Plymouth Plantation, as he gazes out over flat, treeless fields, which still stretch uninterrupted to the Lincolnshire Wolds, low and blue on the horizon. In the fields men and children, some as young as seven, would be tending oxen, sheep and cattle on its common grazing lands; these days the fields are given over to wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and cabbages.

He would have heard nightingales chirruping, the boom of a bittern and the miaow of buzzards. Barn owls would have swooped out of the night sky - all rare sounds today.

Among today’s houses is the remains of the manor owned by his grandfather. Built in the early 1500s and the largest farm in the village, it was saved from demolition over the centuries by history-minded volunteers and is now a private home.  

In Bradford’s day villagers, about 120 of them, lived in mean, smoke-filled houses with a hearth and chimney and perhaps a ladder into an attic. Crowded too, with women giving birth to eight to ten children of which five or six survived.

There was little opportunity to escape their lot. Everyone in Austerfield would have been subject to the immutable class system which dominated 17th century England with the aristocracy at the top and at the bottom the 25 percent who scratched a living in the fields.

The husbandmen, or farmers, working on the land owned by the likes of Bradford’s grandfather would be lucky to earn £15 a year and laborers might pick up one shilling a day.

If this was not grueling enough the population was at constant threat from the plague which helped keep the average life expectancy to about 39 years old.

To get a sense of the Bradford’s small world, walk, drive or meander in his steps to the manor in nearby Scrooby where he studied the scriptures at the feet of William Brewster, one of the Separatist movements most inspiring leaders.This is where the idea to flee persecution - ‘an adventure almost desperate’ - began for him and his fellow believers. 

He would have trudged across the fields or followed the banks of the sluggish River Idle to its juncture with the River Ryton, crossed by the mill - still there, if a little decrepit looking - and knocked at the door of Brewster’s mediaeval manor tucked away at the end of a lane. It was demolished in 1636-7 though one wing was renovated as a farmhouse in 1750. 

The church of St Wilfrid’s is still standing but, as the vicar’s husband, busy varnishing the pews, confessed, it is in need of a lick of paint today. True, but the crowded churchyard, the ancient pen where stray animals were rounded up and the well-worn pews on which Brewster may have prayed again, help tell a little of the Mayflower saga.

Next stop; All Saints' Church in Babworth, seven miles away where the Separatists crowded into the sturdy 15th century nave to listen to the iconoclastic preacher Richard Clyfton railing against the church’s ‘vile ceremonies and vain canons and decrees’.  

The building fell into ruin but was restored in 1830 and again in 1864 and has a tower steeple with three bells and a clock, a nave, chancel and a handsome porch. The inmates of a nearby prison presented the church with a matchstick model of the Mayflower and a painting shows our seekers after truth walking across the fields to prayer. Older members of the congregation reckon they were modelled on the prison staff of the day while others will be intrigued by a damaged figure in the nave which looks just like the Jedi master Yoda in Star Wars. Proof that the force is with them, perhaps.  

The graveyard is shaded by gloomy conifers but last week it was lit up by a carpet of snowdrops. Did Bradford pick his way carefully between them, recalling how Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these? 

Perhaps he was not given to such fancies but the visitor should try to conjure up the sound of prayers and the passion of their beliefs.

You won’t be disappointed. 

Next; on the trail of the great escape

Seventeenth century insult of the month. Slubberdegullion druggles. Slabberdegullion from the Dutch  overslubberen, to wade through mud or the English slabber, to drool. Druggle, task made infinitely more difficult by a state of intoxication. A combination of the words drunk and struggle. Definitely an insult.

That was Life

These photographs from the long-lost (and lamented) Life magazine capture the era of US supremacy in the 20th century. Before someone decided to make the place great again. They also remind us how the role of the photographer has been diminished in contemporary newspapers.

Here’s the piece in the New European;

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/richard-holledge-on-life-magazine-photo-journalism-1-6433112

Experiment in Leningrad

The Scarlet Flower

In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had a spring in its collectivised step. Censorship had softened; premier Nikita Krushchev had encouraged a scintilla of freedom by permitting cultural exchanges with the west. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin created a galvanising upsurge in national pride by becoming the first man to reach space.

Into this relatively tractable atmosphere stepped the London gallerist Eric Estorick, an avid collector of modern Italian art, who was hoping to reconnect with the culture his Jewish parents had left behind in 1905 when they emigrated to the US. Visiting Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1960, he met the artist Anatoli Kaplan, who introduced him to a group of talented friends known as the Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory (LEGL), the graphics section of the state-run Union of Artists. 

So impressed was Estorick that he bought hundreds of their works — some for as little as nine roubles each — and staged an exhibition in May 1961 of paintings by 27 of them in his new Grosvenor Gallery back home. For the first time since the Russian Revolution, western art lovers were able to see contemporary art from the USSR — and, perhaps more telling, discover works that defied the glum stereotype of Socialist Realism. Instead, the art historian Nikolai Kononikhin has written, “they found an unexpected vitality and humanity free from ideological cliché”. 

Lithography from Leningrad, currently at London’s Estorick Collection, is a small but perfectly focused display of works by 15 of the artists who featured in the original show — the first time they have been exhibited together in the UK since the 1960s. The catalogue gives a wider insight into their work, with many more examples of paintings by the artists who strove together, elbow to elbow, in a scruffy basement cluttered with easels, presses and the stones used for printing. It was, wrote the Leningrad poet Lev Mochalov, “an island of the blessed”. (A comprehensive exhibition of their work will be held in St Petersburg next November.)

Kaplan already had a reputation for designing posters and illustrating books. His work is characterised by his atmospheric black-and-white lithographs of Jewish life. Here, we see “Summer Garden”, a poetic, rather wistful scene of a boy pulling another on a sled beside railings and a foreboding urn-shaped tomb. Estorick snapped Kaplan up for a solo show later in 1961, which was so successful that The Burlington Magazine was moved to declare: “They are so brilliantly good that in comparison Chagall seems like a sloppy amateur.”

If Kaplan was the best known of the collective, Boris Ermolaev was the father figure — “like a holy elder”, declared fellow artist Valentin Kurdov — to whom many turned for help and encouragement. Like Kaplan, Ermolaev stayed true to his roots throughout his career, rarely deviating from charming, stylised scenes of peasant life represented in simple primary colours — images of a stone mason, women doing embroidery or resting from their labours during the harvest. They capture a Russian world that was disappearing even then. 

As the 1960s progressed and the effects of the second world war and the Stalin era diminished, awareness of the outside world within Russia grew — particularly in the arts scene. Books and journals slipped past the censors containing revelations of European movements such as Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, which brought a dose of modernism into the folk art traditions the Laboratory embraced. 

Among the most significant influences were Matisse and his contemporary the French Fauvist-cum-Naturalist Albert Marquet, as the vivacious still lifes of Aleksandr Vedernikov and Mikhail Sculyari testify. In the words of Aleksandra Yakobson, the ferment of creativity in the Leningrad basement amounted to “a hotbed of free thinking”. 

Yakobson herself produced a series of engaging images, such as the child we see in “The Scarlet Flower”, pink-cheeked and artless, about to inhale the perfume of the blossom. She also portrayed cheery family groups, a drunken musician being bundled home and a nude emerging from the bath looking clean and wholesome. 

The work of Vera Matyukh, one of many women who were part of the collective, is altogether bolder both in subject and style. Her images depict women in urban settings and as independent as she was, such as the spirited “Petrol Station Queen” or the magenta-lipped “Mother”. 

Having survived the blockade of Leningrad with a newborn baby in her arms, Matyukh was evacuated to Kazan in south-west Russia before moving back to Leningrad at the end of the war, where she joined the LEGL. “I remember it all with joy,” she wrote. “Besides art, which was the most important, there was a lot of joyfulness, dancing, skiing trips and excursions. All this was part of the life.”

Given state strictures, Soviet artists were required to take inspiration from their own heritage and immediate surroundings. Yet one artist, Gerta Nemenova, was allowed to study art in Paris where she had classes with Fernand Léger and met the pioneering avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova, who had moved there from Russia before the 1917 Revolution. Nemenova developed a style that was quite different from the others; her sketches of writers and actors, mostly in black and white, are done with expressive and deceptively simple strokes, which captured her subjects with a forceful immediacy.

Only one artist featured here, Grigor Israilevich, rocked the political boat. His sinister image“Owl and Hourglass” is part of a series about time slipping away, but he also painted a fierce monochrome series entitled “Rhinoceros”, inspired by the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 satire on fascism and mob mentality. 

Israilevich, who died in 1999, was also the only one who ventured into abstract art, with angry, expressionist works attacking the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.The Union of Artists was finally disbanded in 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the LEGL was closed. By then, most of the group had died or moved on. The island of the blessed was no more.

Lithography from Leningrad: Eric Estorick’s Adventure in Soviet Art is at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 22

The curious world of George Stubbs, horse whisperer

Milton Keynes used to be mocked for its concrete cows and empty boulevards. Now it is one of the fastest growing towns in England and boasts an admirable gallery displaying not cows by the glorious horses of George Stubbs. Not be missed.

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/macabre-story-george-stubbs-under-skin-subjects-1-6352195

Latent Orient

Brilliant headline from the New European to go with this piece about show at the British Museum on oriental art.

Colonial baggage is not the only take away from western depictions of the east

Frederick Bridgman The Prayer

PUBLISHED: 16:26 30 October 2019

Western artistic depictions of the East come freighted with colonial baggage. But they also show a powerful, inquisitive passion for another world as RICHARD HOLLEDGE reports

A group of men are gathered around a coffee shop in the ancient city of Jaffa. They sit, they stand, they gossip. The convivial moment was captured in a watercolour by the artist David Roberts in 1839 and is one of many scenes of everyday - but exotic - life featured in the British Museum's new exhibition: Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art.

As the title suggests, the exhibition attempts to redress perceptions of the east as represented by 19th century artists like Roberts by demonstrating how design, ceramics and fashion in Europe were, in fact, influenced by eastern craftsmen over 500 years.

It also provokes discussion about the meaning of Orientalism. In 1812 the poet Byron defined an orientalist as someone who was an expert in the languages, history and philosophy of the east. During the 19th century Orientalism had become an art movement with western artists visiting the Middle East and North Africa in great numbers and producing studies of a strangely foreign culture in engaging, figurative works bursting with colour and energy.

This imagery - or the putative meaning behind it - was challenged by the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism in which he argued that such portrayals were symptomatic of a colonial view of the east, a lazy stereotyping of an inferior people with a culture that was backward and dangerous.

He argued that many western governments felt they had the right to decide what happened in the east - as if the entire population could be "shaken up like peanuts in a jar".

He wrote: "In the process, the uncountable sediments of history, a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments..."

Of course, that 20th century perspective would have been incomprehensible to Victorians who would indeed have reckoned that not only did Britannia rule the waves and hold sway in the Middle East but had every right to do so.

That attitude of effortless superiority can be summed up with one of the smallest exhibits, that of an 1817 music sheet for a burlesque performance entitled Their Customs are Very Peculiar.

Take the Roberts water colour. The Victorian art lover would have taken the scene on face value, an attractive glimpse of an alien world, but a quote from the text accompanying the work reads: "Wherever there are pipes, coffees and Mussulmans, it is the resort of the idler."

That would have been accepted with complacent acquiescence by 19th century Europeans but today it would be considered a patronising sneer and one that supports Said's argument.

Debunking such stereotypes is at the heart of the exhibition, which is a collaboration with the Kuala Lumpur-based Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM).

A map of the Bosphorous Straits which separate Europe from Asia at Istanbul is dated from 1588 and with its references to other states and distant peoples is a reminder that for centuries both the Safavid empire in Iran (1502-1736) and the Ottomans who dominated the region for 600 years until 1922 were at least as powerful as their western counterparts.

Inevitably, examples of sophisticated design and radiant craftsmanship made their way from east to west, such as ceramics from Iznik, in Turkey, which European artisans did their best to emulate. A plate produced in Veneto, Italy, in 1600 pales into lacklustre mediocrity compared with the original from the same period with its a floral pattern ablaze with vivid blues and golds.

The influence of the Ottoman craftsmen was acknowledged by leading French ceramist Théodore Deck who copied a plate from about 1530-40 in ravishing colours and almost matched it for quality. Almost. One can only marvel at the translucent quality of a mosque lamp from the northern Indian Mamluk dynasty with its gilded and enamelled glass, or the deep cerulean of a Safavid vase. No wonder they were in such demand and how eagerly they were imitated.

Wall tiles inspired by Islamic patterns and calligraphy became hugely popular in the Europe and North America of the 19th century. Perhaps the best-known examples of their use can be found in Leighton House, London, where tiles with turquoise flowers and birds etched around with Arabic script line the walls of the Arab Hall. Many were purchased by the House's owner, the artist Sir Frederic Leighton, during his travels in Cairo and Damascus and the rest were faithfully copied by ceramicist William de Morgan to create a house as "beautiful as a poet's dream".

Tiles decorated the smoking rooms and steam baths of the wealthy in Victorian England - later, they were even fitted on the Titanic - and inspired the decor of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was coloured in primary shades of red, yellow and blue in a nod to the Moorish palette displayed in Granada's Alhambra.

Islamic crafts were all the rage at the Exhibition, with jugs, pots and filigreed jewellery catching the eye and wall hangings which were judged to be in "the gorgeous taste of Persia". Meanwhile across Europe the demand for Iznik faience ware in plates and vases boomed and the well-to-do lusted after silks from Safavid Persia to use in carpets and clothing.

In 18th century France purses made out of 100-year-old silk were turned into elegant embroidered fashion accessories. No high society lady could be without one.

Fascinating costume books from Turkey by European and local artists not only entranced the fashion conscious west but also revealed a society of some sophistication.

They were often used as aids by the artists who only fleetingly visited the east - if at all. Delacroix, who restricted his visits to Algeria, often relied on them for his sketches and the elegant robes worn by Cesare dell'Acqua's soulful harem woman (Oriental Woman Burning incense) were most likely copied in the comfort of his Brussels studio.

Most, however, did make the journey and spent time in Egypt, Tangiers and Morocco in order to understand their subject, and the results are works vibrant with colour and detailed observation which conjure up an idealised world where poverty and hardship rarely spoils the view.

Perhaps best known is John Frederick Lewis, who lived in Cairo and adopted the dress and customs of the Egyptians. His friend, the novelist William Thackeray, declared the artist was enjoying a life of "Arabian Nights glamour ... a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life".

His portraits of Arab chiefs, a stoic market stall owner, and A Mamlook Bey, a portrait of a desert warrior, are among the most striking, not least, for their authentic appearance.

But they are not what they seem. The characters in the Lewis painting are, in fact, self portraits. He is the stall holder, the warrior prince. What is one to make of that? Is it an example of western superiority, does he consider himself better suited to the role than an actual Egyptian or, rather, is he eager to prove he embraced both sides of the cultural divide?

Perhaps, more prosaically, he wanted to save on the cost of models.

What he did share with his fellow Orientalists was quite simply the passion to portray this world of endless fascination with as much verve as they could muster.

The British Museum exhibition has devoted one wall to paintings divided into religious works, street scenes and military figures.

The Hajj by Alfred Dehodencq is a tumultuous scene of pilgrims heading for Mecca with drums beating and cymbals clashing as they stumble along the shores of the Red Sea with their camels and horses and flags held high.

Altogether quieter, In The Madrasa by the Austrian Ludwig Deutsch shows children undergoing their religious education while the Swiss Otto Pilny captures the rawness of the desert with tribesmen on their knees in Evening Prayers in the Desert.

Frederick Bridgman, improbably a native of Alabama, USA, movingly captures a private moment in the mosque in The Prayer. The worshipper, hands apart in supplication, eyes raised beseechingly, stands out from the deep shadows in what is an intense expression of faith, painted with respect and emotion.

Bridgman was a stickler for detail. The man has followed the custom by removing his shoes and, as Bridgman wrote, "the soles of which are put together in order that the profane dust of the street shall not contaminate the sacred precincts".

He disapproved of those who failed to show the same respect. "A French officer in top-boots once showed me a mosque, walking about as if the place belonged to him, and told me to keep on my shoes."

No hint of patronising imperialism here.

Arab Warriors by the German Christian Schreyer has armed horsemen so vigorous they seem about to stampede off the gallery wall in a flurry of heat and dust while The Guard by the Spaniard Antonio Maria Fabrés y Costa is a tremendous character framed by guns and swords. Not a man to cross.

It is the street scenes of ordinary folk, the world of mosques and markets, that bring the Orient of the 19th century alive. The fine detail of The Pottery Seller by Alphons Mielich illuminates the busyness of market day; The Dice Players by Rudolf Weisse is photographic in its minutiae.

Jean-Léon Gérome's bucolic scene of husband and wife in Egypt perched comfortably on their cart as the oxen tramp around threshing the corn is highly idealised with bright yellow corn and just a fleck of cloud to disturb the clear skies. It is an idyllic scene free from drudgery, but here's what a contemporary writer and photographer had to say about scenes like this, quoting an Ottoman official: "The peasant is a bit less than an animal; a bit more than a plant."

Grist to Edward Said's mill; as was the portrayal of the harem, catnip to the artist as an excuse to paint women in various states of undress and boost their earnings by producing languorous soft porn for Victorian gentlemen.

The examples on show are all very decorous. The Hhareem by Lewis depicts a new slave from Ethiopia being presented to the pasha in his luxurious dwelling to see if she is a worthy addition to his collection of concubines, but there is nothing more racy than a bare shoulder.

As a corrective to the representation of women which, harem apart, is non-existent in this collection, works by three contemporary female artists round off the exhibition. Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-American artist addresses oppression in her home country in Women of Allah and a photographic triptych by the Moroccan Lalla Essaydi, The Women of Morocco, challenges 19th century perceptions of women such as a Delacroix sketch of a harem, Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

Boldest of all, Raeda Saadeh, challenges the dystopia of Middle East politics head on in Who Will Make Me Real? by wrapping herself in copies of a Palestinian newspaper which carries stories about the region's endless conflict.

A necessary balance perhaps to answer the perceived institutionalised imperialism of the 19th century artists, but not one that compares like with like, era with era. With hindsight, perhaps the Orientalist painters did stereotype eastern culture but what cannot be taken away from them is not just their virtuosity but their genuine curiosity and passion for a world they captured in all its richness.

Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art runs at the British Museum until January 26

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/europhile-art-western-depictions-of-the-east-1-6340381

The Hajj, Alfred Deohodencq

Ludwig Deutsch's 'In the Madrasa', 1890.

This is really torturing - the pain and shame of Korea's DMZ

One of the oddest tourist attractions - maybe in the world - is the Demilitarised Zone - the DMZ - which separates North and South Korea. Thousand flock from Seoul to peer over across the pleasant hills beyond. They see no sign of peril - but it lurks.

I found the whole experience beyond bizarre when I visited a few years ago - but I didn’t buy a tee shirt.

Read more in this piece in the New European - https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/art-korean-demilitarized-zone-1-6327901

One of Kyungah-Ham’s fabulous chandeliers

Embrace by Joung-Ki Min

Heinkuhn OH, A soldier standing on the water,

Magnificent men

The Brooklands Museum, near Weybridge, Surrey was a runner up in the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award in 2108. And quite right. The place is a delight, quirky, packed to the rafters with gleaming motors and improbable aircraft held together with sticky tape and hope.

This year it celebrates the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic by Allcock and Brown. They completed the adventure by crashing into a bog near Clifden, Connemara, where I once stayed in pursuit of Peter O’Toole who lived by the ocean nearby. That’s another story.

Brooklands is a joy even for those who would normally be uninterested by anything mechanical like me. It is part of the story of a Britain which ruled the race track and the airwaves.

Read more

Make or rake

Things you find out… an outfit called Muck Rack lists the work of journalists Me included. Goes back four years. If you have the energy google my name and Muck Rack